Pakistan’s head coach Grant Bradburn has backed the team’s top-order batting ahead of the Green Shirts ICC World Cup clash against Sri Lanka, despite an unimpressive run in recent games.
Addressing a press conference ahead of the match against Sri Lanka in Hyderabad, Bradburn highlighted that the team’s focus on continuous improvement.
“We’re becoming confident as a group and as a coaching staff. We’re very keen on critiquing our performance, especially when we win,” the head coach said.
“Not only when we lose, which is obviously common, but we’re really searching for our formula and what happens consistently when Pakistan wins games of cricket,” he said.
He acknowledged that the team’s batting in the power play had not met expectations, but Bradburn expressed confidence in his top-order batsmen.
“We’ve got full faith in our top order. They will click at some stage. And we’re open and honest to say that we’re not getting what we would like out of the Powerplay as yet.”
“Our full faith is with all of our players that could take up that position. We’ve got four to five options that we could put out at the top of the order and we’d be very confident that they can deliver not only the runs but the tempo that we want to play at.”
“We want to create a tempo for the middle order and the back end of our innings to build from. We’re not getting that at the moment, so those are discussions that we’re having, but we’ve got full faith in all of our options at the top,” the coach said.
Bradburn added: “We’re certainly very happy with other phases of our game which have kicked into gear and did enough the other night to get over the line and create two points for us coming out of that dressing room which was the ultimate goal.
We also look at it as six phases of the game. There’s the Powerplay, the mid-phase, and the close, obviously, in both innings. So, our simple focus is to win more of those phases than the opposition, and you generally win the game,” he said.
Replying to a question, he highlighted Hasan Ali’s contributions to the team, saying: “He bats, he bowls, he fields, and he’s a live wire in the dressing room always full of positivity.”
Also Read:Pakistan Cricket Faces Coaching Exodus
